Saturday 6 June 2009 19.01 EDT
First published on Saturday 6 June 2009 19.01 EDT

When did Hollywood start using the word franchise to describe a series of movies? Presumably when the men in suits with business degrees took over the studios. Why did film critics start talking like film producers and use terms like franchise, player, gross? Probably because they wanted to sound like serious professional observers rather than literary dilettantes. Anyway, movie franchises today are assuming greater significance than traditional business ones, and young directors like JJ Abrams, who has assumed control of the Star Trek brand, and Joseph McGinty Nichol (who styles himself simply McG), who's made the fourth Terminator movie, are probably in a better position than their contemporaries who've been promoted to manage General Motors dealerships.

Abrams was born the year Star Trek arrived on TV. McG (hitherto known for music videos and the two Charlie's Angels features) was 15 when The Terminator appeared in 1984 to make the reputation of its writer-director James Cameron and turn Arnold Schwarzenegger into a major star. The Terminator was a relatively simple story in which a future world dominated by a rogue artificial intelligence called Skynet sends an indestructible cyborg (Arnie) back in time to kill Sarah Connor, who will in due time bear the child destined to lead the resistance to Skynet.

Meanwhile, the future human survivors send their agent, Kyle Reese, to protect her. Seven years later in Terminator: Judgment Day, altogether more complex in its plot and hardware, Arnie becomes a good cyborg come to protect Sarah's son, John Connor (note the initials), and do battle with a superior but malevolent terminator. He's been dispatched through time by the future John Connor.

This sequel was an even greater success than the original, but by the time the third film came out Cameron had moved on and up with Titanic and the journeyman Jonathan Mostow was assigned to direct Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003. Schwarzenegger was again a benevolent cyborg and was once more to rescue John Connor, this time threatened by an evil female cyborg.

As in the previous two movies, there is, along with the extreme violence and destruction, a lot of wit in the proceedings. Also, like the first two, there is a strong allegorical element of a theological and political nature, reflecting on the bomb and the teachings of the New Testament. Sufficient indeed for Mark Rowlands, a professor at the University of Miami, to describe Arnie as "the philosophical giant of Hollywood" in his lively book on exploring ideas through SF movies, The Philosopher at the End of the Universe

Like the second and third films in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the makers of Terminator Salvation start in the middle of things, expecting us to be acquainted with all that has gone before the way schoolboys were once expected to know about Greek mythology. The time is 2018, 14 years after Judgment Day when Skynet launched its pre-emptive nuclear attack on Earth and dystopia has come to California. Los Angeles is a pile of rubble, Skynet has established its sulphurous headquarters in San Francisco and humans lead a primitive life in an arid wasteland, threatened everywhere by horrendous machines.

Bands of resistance fighters are controlled by an international military command operating from an atomic submarine deep in the Pacific and receive aerial back-up from a tattered jet squadron. To the other myths that informed the earlier films are here added borrowings from Mad Max, the Second World War, the cold war and Star Wars. One of Skynet's projects is to round up all human beings for extermination or transformation into machines and they're transported and sorted out in a manner calculated to evoke the Holocaust.

Once again, a grim John Connor (Christian Bale) is a key resistance leader, who must now rescue his father, Kyle Reese (a teenager in his current incarnation) from captivity. He's also faced with a problematic maverick cyborg terminator called Marcus Wright, who appears to have human sympathies of an ambivalent kind. The film is a gloomy affair, noisy, fashionably dark, totally humourless and with the briefest guest appearance by a naked Arnie, who looks computer-generated. The dystopia to end them all, its washed-out look creates an impression of universal physical and spiritual pollution. As it is necessary to have some focus for our ill will other than mere machinery, the chilly, calculating leaders operating from their submarine are a villainous crew, made inhuman in their ruthlessness. They're led by an American four-star general played by Michael Ironside, who looks like Jack Nicholson without the impishness.

The presence of Christian Bale, whose very name suggests suffering and torment, is significant. "Christian was hesitant at first because he needed to know that it would be more than just an action picture," the film's producer says.

Bale brings an overwhelming sense of doom and weighty solemnity to almost everything he does, whether it's the Batman movies, the apocalyptic Reign of Fire or The Machinist. This, I suspect, may have something to do with the start of his film career at the age of 13 in the gruelling Empire of the Sun. There, he played the teenage version of JG Ballard and re-enacted the events that shaped Ballard as our greatest creator of dystopias and clear-eyed explorer of the new and extreme states of mind brought about by the political, scientific, social and technological changes of the past century.

David Cox: The decline of the Terminator franchise suggests that a hunger for something in cinemagoers is going unmet – ideas. It's not computers we're scared of any more. What about financial collapse, climate change, bioterrorism?